Goodby Innovation Salon

In SFO this week I was kindly invited by Lizi Cruz and John Thorpe to attend Goodby Silverstein & Partners first Innovation Salon. The idea is to get together a bunch of smart, future focused people (agency, clients, suppliers) and have a chat about what is happening in the new world of marketing.

Lots of interesting discussion about the future of advertising/digital, a fair amount of technobabble, a little bit of trash talking (Jimmy Wales is going to crush Google!) and some new thoughts for me.

First up, communities. Rudy Wilson from Frito posed an interesting question about whether or not conversational marketing will ruin the media it seeks to exploit. I think this is an important consideration – and might suggest that simply following the WOMMA code of ethics will prevent this problem.

Second really interesting perspective was from HP’s Daina Middleton shared some very interesting perspective from her experience energizing, nurturing and participating in their imaging and printing communities. Her key points:

Ease yourself into the community – you can’t come in shouting

Reach out – it WILL be a multi-disciplinary effort – involving multiple internal disciplines (marketing, IT, customer service, legal, PR, etc.) and it will be challenging to get it done. But you will not be able to effectively do this without everyone on board.

Community involvement (conversational marketing) is not a drive by. It is a commitment. If you are going to do it – plan on doing it for the long haul. You can’t walk into the party, shout “HERE I AM AREN’T I BEAUTIFUL” and then walk away.

Budget accordingly. Budget for ongoing support or else you will be in trouble.

Third, I found John Battelle’s comments about media very interesting. Now, I may be somewhat clueless, but I am happy to learn from others. John pointed out that “media” is anything that gathers eyeballs. It is any content that people will consume. This means that every place on the web that people gather is media. Including forums, newsgroups, wikia’s, etc. His firm helps brands connect to this new world of media.

Our firm (MotiveQuest) helps brands understand what is going on in this new world media. What are the core motivations and drivers being expressed by consumers in their online conversations. What does this mean for the brand, the category, the competition.

I’m going to hook-up MotiveQuest (we know what drives them) with Federated Media (who knows where they are and the best *vehicle* for reaching them) to provide an insight heavy road map to the online consumer!

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2 Responses to Goodby Innovation Salon

Thank you so much for attending the Salon. The mashup of interesting people was our goal, learn from each other, share what we all do in different parts of our different industries, and have a bit of fun together. Thanks for your post. We hope to do these every quarter in an interesting venue with a slightly smaller group of our friends & partners and I hope you can attend the next one.

Tom–I’m the publisher & CRO at Federated Media. Let’s definitely get together. I’d love to learn more about MotiveQuest. I, too, loved Daina’s insights. Her second point, that it will be a multi-disciplinary effort, is right on. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be hard. The good news: We all have a lot of experience doing PR and advertising in other media, and that experience just needs to be adapted to new technology platforms. I’m at chas at federated media (no space) dot net.